I didn’t finish NaNoWriMo… again…

Ah dear. I tried, I really did. But I got to nearly 7,000 words and that was it, I was done. It didn’t help that my little Dude decided to get six teeth from 30 October all through November, which meant he was more restless than usual and therefore even more difficult to help sleep. And there was some real tough shit going down in the Curiosikat house that needed some serious attention, heated discussions about moving house and just general adjustments to having a child… yes, still. So I bombed out with NaNo again.

The fridge where I used to live in London

I’m disappointed, but there have been some positives:

1. I realised that my ‘idea’ is very different in theory to what it is in practice. That is, when I wrote, I found myself just telling a long-winded story about myself and what happened and never really even got to the stuff that the actual main bit of the story was about! I kept rabbiting on… ‘and then I did this and that was pretty awesome, but then I did this other thing and that was also awesome…’ bla bla bla bla bla… So all it really became was a glorified hindsight diary entry. It wasn’t good writing at all. There were some good memories there, but that wasn’t why I decided to write about this idea. I had grand plans, to come up with a really unique yet marketable real life story of… well, I don’t want to talk about it too much. But suffice it to say, it’s a pretty awesome idea. Or at least if I could write it, it would be. I found myself absolutely hating what I was writing, as it was just ‘and then…’ over and over. There was no real story there. Frustrating, yes, but eye-opening.

2. I actually did manage 7,000 words, which for me, with a baby, is pretty good. And some of those words were written 2,000 at a time, which means I’m more than capable of making that 50,000 in the month. It was refreshing to just let myself blurt out words, even if they weren’t that wonderful, and I’m glad I did actually manage something.

3. I now know my idea a lot better. I know that there’s heaps of memoir type stuff floating about in my brain in amongst the ideas, and I think I got a lot of those out, which leaves more room for good ideas. I also know that what I was planning on writing wasn’t just another boring self-indulgent diary entry; it was actually a good story, worth writing and worth reading. So I will attempt it again, one of these days.

4. I can give some other ideas the go ahead, now I’ve done a bit of work on that one.

All in all, yes it was a failure, but not a dismal one. And I will be back with a vengeance and some new ideas next year!